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Google Analytics & Omniture Discrepancies

I am seeing a significant difference between my traffic numbers in Google Analytics and Omniture (Omniture has significantly more). I do not expect them to report exactly the same numbers but these are just too far off. Any idea why that is, or which one I should trust more?

5 Responses

you always will see differences between analytics tools. it has to do in the way they calculate their metrics. for instance unique visitors are based on how long the cookie lives. Omniture and GA will have different expiration times and therefore report differently. it doesn't matter which you use, just choose one for main reporting and stick with it, since omniture is an enterprise solution and you pay a lot for it i would use omniture for main reporting if i were you.

To add to Irving's point - seeing as you're using Omniture I'll assume that your website will be pulling in a number of visitors. The free version of GA, when faced with a lot of data, will use sampled data, effectively a % of your data, to give you a quicker report. It's accuracy varies, and you musn't forget that it is an aggregated score.

I harbour resentment to omniture (unreliable reporting, filters that break, generally inaccurate data, gone downhill since Adobe etc.), but you should get more accurate results with it.

Thanks for the responses guys. I am aware that the different tools will have different numbers, but the scale of the difference is what concerns me. We have a difference of about 400 visits for a site that only gets around 1,000 visits per month (not enough for GA sampling to take effect). So the results of our marketing campaigns can have very different results depending on which tool I decide to believe.

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